Just purchased something with cash back in Tesco as soon as I entered pin my app made a a noise saying money had been taken.
However payment was declined at till. So as far as Tesco is concerned I have not paid for goods. But bank says I have paid as my balance is now £47 down and have no access to it.
Who is to blame Tesco or monzo?
Tesco said not their issue and I should get money back in 3 to 4 working days so end of next week.
I can’t afford to be £47 light as have bills to pay
You haven’t ‘paid’ the money has been reserved for the payment and is still in your account. If you look at the transaction detail, you’ll see it’s marked as ‘pending’. If Tesco can’t collect it because their machine dropped out, or whatever, then it will be released in the few days already described.
It looks like the transaction went through as far as the bank but Tesco failed to pick up whatever acknowledgement/approval message is sent in response to a transaction request.
It’ll likely sort itself out over time. In the meantime, if you contact Monzo in app they should be able to reverse it for you straight away.
It happens from time to time. The money hasn’t been taken from your account yet, it’s just been requested by Tesco and so unavailable for you to spend.
I had this happen last week, the transaction reversed after a few hours. If not you can ask Monzo to reverse it but you may need your receipt
@Henhead You have my upmost sympathy. Although the above responses are correct and that the money hasn’t been spent it doesn’t help when it’s unavailable, which is what seems to get regularly overlooked in these situations. We don’t all have thousands in the bank to cover pending transactions! I’d personally be raging if £47 was unavailable whilst waiting on it to “drop off” I’m confident that Monzo will get the funds back to you a lot quicker than other banks would.
You can reverse it in-app. Go into the transaction, scroll to the bottom and hit this button.
Then
I wouldn’t say it’s been overlooked since I haven’t seen any value judgements from anyone saying that the situation is ‘OK’. You seem to be reacting to what you’re reading into other people’s posts rather than something that’s been written.
4 posts were split to a new topic: Deleted posts 19/10
Hi all, I’ve removed some posts that were a bit off-topic. Please let’s keep to the subject at hand and remember to try and interpret one another’s posts in the most generous light (as we’d want our own posts to be read – tone gets lost in writing sometimes).
I’m sorry to hear about the trouble you had, @Henhead, and I totally get that it can be difficult when, as @Brian_L has mentioned, you can’t wait for the payment to reverse automatically because you have other expenses to pay – that process can take days, and financial systems aren’t taking situations like this into account. But @Feathers and @Anarchist have described the problem accurately, I believe, and @glasgow and @HoddzDJ are right that Monzo customer support should be able to help you out sooner if you get in touch.
A similar thing happened to me last week when Trainline was experiencing a system outage – the payment looked like it had been taken from my Monzo account, but I didn’t receive a booking confirmation or any notification – it was real pain to figure out! Hope it gets sorted for you soon.
Do you guys at Monzo find this to be particularly a problem at Tesco?
It seems to me that transactions fail at Tesco more so than other retailers (obviously regardless of whether Monzo is used or another bank), so would love to know if there is a reason why - cos it must be something going wrong at their end (Tesco) I would assume?
I’ve not noticed any particular problem at Tesco… could be a local problem. You could try complaining to tesco but in my experience customer support people don’t really understand how these things work.
I don’t think it’s just local - it happens in many different locations with Tesco for me.
Also hear of others mentioning Tesco more than other retailers too.
But who knows 
I had a similar situation on Saturday. made a purchase at Superdrug which was not authorised and then had to use pin which went through. Same thing happened 17 minutes later at Savers. Noticed later that on both occasions there were duplicate entries. The Superdrug entry was reversed by me later that day and to my surprise it reappeared as a debit in the early hours of Monday morning. I was not able to reverse the Savers entry. Getting a bit miffed about all this I used the in app chat facility this afternoon to question what was going on. This request for help has now disappeared from my chat history. What is going on - have we increased the number of customers to the extent that service is going downhill fast.
I get it fairly often at Boots - the staff member said to me they sometimes have problems with MasterCard debit cards, and mentioned Monzo. I’m not sure if he could see I was using Monzo, I used Apple Pay, so he may have spotted it on my screen. It happens at least every 2 or 3 weeks. It actually happened a lot on Curve so I stopped using it for this reason. I assume their POS times out before the MasterCard system has gotten a response.
I shop much more frequently in Sainsbury’s (at least daily) but haven’t ever had it there.
I wonder why it happens with contactless and not (at least nowhere near as frequently) with chip and pin. Obviously now I rarely use chip and pin which could just make it seem like a contactess issue even if it’s across the board, although I do not remember this frequency of failed transactions before I started using contactless.
Happens with both contactless on the physical debit card, and Apple Pay for me.
Again though this is definitely not a Monzo issue as it doesn’t matter which card/credit card I am using and was happening long before switching my current acc to Monzo.
I have had the issue with Visa Debit, Mastercard Credit, Amex Credit, and now Monzo Mastercard debit.
Tesco in the past was the worse for me for refunding and then recharging.
What makes you sure that this is not a Monzo issue. My understanding was that a contactless transaction which failed had to be voided before a second transaction could be processed
Was chip and pin.
For some reason Tesco did not receive the authorization code either because it was not sent, timed out or Tesco systems lost connection.
Apparently it’s called a ghost transaction by Tesco.
Monzo reverse payment same day after contacting them but said to keep an eye out incase Tesco tried to claim it again. Which they did not
Just had a Tesco transaction decline at the till today but the pending transaction has still gone onto my account. Had to repeat the payment so now it has come off my balance twice.
I’ll give it a day or 2 and hopefully it will reverse automatically, if not then I’ll raise in app.
More problems at Tesco 
. What with declined transactions and their other issue of matching the wrong pre-auth code with the transaction they then present for the money on, i wish Tesco’s payment systems would be more reliable.
One by one this week, all my local Tesco’s self service machines have been dying a slow death, and now all have a sign on saying out of order 